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Visual test developed by UR researchers can predict smarts

Researchers at the University of Rochester discover that a simple visual task can predict IQ.

Imagine driving down the road. Trees along the way are shifting in the wind and pedestrians are walking at a distance on the sidewalk, but your attention is drawn to something moving quickly in front of your car.

They call it the "motion quotient" — a way to roughly measure a person's intelligence in cases where an IQ test won't work.

The test asked participants to look at flashing graphics of black and white bars and decide whether they were moving left or right. The graphic was sometimes small and sometimes large, a difference that led to a surprising result.

When the graphic was large, people with a higher IQ did a much poorer job of determining which direction the bars were moving compared to those with lower IQs. When the graphic was small, the higher-IQ cohort performed much better.

It's a rule of thumb in cognitive neuroscience that the brain perceives large, uniformly-moving objects, like the scenery from a moving vehicle, as background, said Duje Tadin, one of the lead UR researchers. When higher-IQ participants failed to detect the bars' motion in the larger graphic, it showed their brains were better at filtering out background information.

That's not the same thing as intelligence, Tadin said, but it's close.

"Our brains our really limited and we have to prioritize what's processed," he said. "If you have a brain that's good at prioritizing, it's going to be good at a lot of things."

The study, published in the science journal Current Biology last month, opens a host of possibilities for new research in the field of cognitive and visual neuroscience. Tadin has evidence from a five-week study in which people improved their ability to tune out background information, improving their focus. What effect that might have on their measured intelligence is an open question.

He also plans targeted studies on people with autism, attention-deficit disorder and other neurological afflictions. According to an earlier study, autistic children did twice as well at the moving-bars test as non-autistic people, regardless of graphic size.

The research is particularly useful because it correlates intelligence, which is difficult to isolate in brain scans, with motion perception, a much easier function to track.

Allison Sekuler, a professor of psychology, neuroscience and behavior at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said the results in the UR study were "off the charts." She predicted further study would give a more nuanced view of the link between intelligence and other functions.

"It could potentially give us a way to tap into intelligence measures for groups that would be difficult to tap into otherwise," she said. "A lot of the normal tests rely on verbal responses, and that doesn't work for people who are speech-impaired, or for people whose first language isn't English."

Tadin was careful to distinguish between the brain's ability to focus visually and the broader idea of concentration, but the study does provide some evidence that the ability to multi-task might not be as beneficial as imagined — if it exists at all.

"Attention is willful, but the basic principle is the same: you have to ignore something to do something else," Tadin said. "Some multi-tasking is necessary, but we have to admit there are limits to how many things we can do at the same time."